Austin Sound

Austin isn’t known for its discrete seasons; sure, at some point in April the dry crackle of leaves is replaced by the blast of an angry, long-hungover sun, but patterns change so quickly day-to-day that it often seems as if winter and summer co-occur. Until the Autumn, the fourth full-length album by Austin’s The Story Of, exists in this gap between Summer and death, where nostalgia and hope seem at once lost and omnipresent. Cathartic and powerful, this album has the capacity to wear the listener out almost as fast as it lifts him up.

Opener “Berkeley” immediately bursts into a thick fog of harmonized voices with vocoded accompaniments. One may immediately notice the increase in (post-)pop sensibility on this album, but as vocalist Christman Hersha utters “don’t back off/ we got ‘em all/just where we want”; the change in style is deliberate, and one can detect this intent behind every note, even if their reasoning for doing so isn’t solidified until later in the album.

In “The Flock,” reverbed spacey arpeggios sound unusually earthen and subtle as synthetic keyboard effects manage to usher in the song’s verse without sounding kitschy. The minimalistic drum work keeps the listener firmly grounded even if the song’s protagonist can’t stay that way. “Let’s go /and get away/ we need to be /somewhere we haven’t seen” sings Hersha. His lyrics are perhaps a symptom of the band, not just a narrative device; the band itself recorded Until the Autumn in the group’s remote cabin on the Colorado River. Despite the group’s need for change and isolation, they are tighter and more in tune with both themselves and their audience than ever.

The upbeat “Hawk Gospel” offers the first definitively happy moments in the album, with the piano-key rhythm reacting playfully to the splashing up-beats of drummer Jonathan Gibbs. A few incomprehensible words by a bandmate creep through the mic between verse and chorus, reminding the listener of the joy of the rapport between bandmembers while playing. Accidental or not—and on an album this refined, it’s probably the latter—the subtle voice-command reinforces the feeling of an organic band experience.

Soon after this, the song collapses and falls into the sparse, atmospheric intro to “Sparrow,” a song that, while containing some truly poetic lyrics, never seems to get off the ground, its wings weighed down by its own saccharine sound. A full two-thirds of the track seems to be a build up, with the payoff being a little too reminiscent of a lilting children’s rhyme to not be irritating. Luckily, it is one of the few low points of the album. The buildup of “Anniversary” seems just the opposite, with a powerful payoff that accelerates to a driving but steady drum-beat overlaying a charming piano line, finalizing itself with some stellar yells unseen in most of the rest of the album.

Evoking the most otherworldly moments of …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, “Centralia” begins with a hypnotic guitar line and ambling drum beat that would feel very at home in a harlequin’s fantasy world. A series of choral vocals coalesce and hang in the air before slam-dancing cymbal hits erupt and retreat, leaving only a void of near silence and the shutter sound of an old cameras and door squeaks.

“Veteran’s Day” starts with a funeral-pitched organ hum that then transitions to a soaring clean guitar melody; the backdrop is of war, but the song encounters both victory and death simultaneously. In the crowning chorus of the album, the vocalist croons “I believe there’s a season for wars to corrupt/ and a year let it come revolve back to love” as the band reaches a sonorant climax. Afterwards, the drums break to an ominous and staccato marching beat, reminding the listener of the necessity and inescapability of conflict. With a sincerity only felt in Weakerthans’ songs, Hersha can be at once ideological and subtle; his politics are merely the backdrop for further exploration, not a vehicle with which one can break our defensive lines. Here, more than anywhere, he is successful – this song can bring the listener close to tears.

on Until the Autumn, the interaction between singer and audience in each novella-crafted song echoes how a man speaks to both a personal confidante and a political constituency. The Story Of have a gift for juxtaposing the intimate with the global until the two are so intertwined they become one and the same. The emotion remains somehow pleasant and haunting, but one cannot pin down whether this concurrence of the alone with the communal leads one to feel love or despair, or to forever fly the chasm between. Regardless, the result is beautiful. ”Maybe I’ll get out/ and maybe I’ll get caught,” says Hersha in “The Flock”, but we are left wondering if he doesn’t somehow hope to accomplish both, escaping with his captors to the place that, according to the story he weaves, it can all be reborn, and one season can flow yet again to the next.

Websites:
www.thestoryof.net
Myspace